About the cartoonist: Bob Eckstein is a writer, illustrator, author, and contributor of cartoons to The New Yorker and West Side Rag. Check out his popular newsletter, The Bob. Read the Rag’s Q & A with him — HERE.
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Excellent perspective as always — thanks! And that’s a particularly apt corner to illustrate the gentrification of the Upper West Side: a fancy hamburger purveyor replaced a then-typical (though outstanding) Chinese restaurant, Ollie’s (which is still missed by many).
The fancy (and noisy) Pickle restaurant replaced a fancier, haute-cuisine restaurant, Ouest, which replaced (if memory serves) a typical neighborhood liquor store (combined with space around the corner that had been a typical neighborhood dry cleaners).
A comfortable neighborhood now gentrified — just like the cartoon!
Ollie’s isn’t that old either – I can’t remember what came before it, though.
Walk north 20 blocks on Broadway to Ollie’s at West 103rd Street
Super Bowl Sunday a few years ago, a Pickle patron in a fur coat pushed be from behind. I didn’t fall, but slopped coffee down the front of my jacket.
She’d decided to push me because I objected with a “hey” when she stepped in front of me after exiting Pickle–paying no attention to where she was a walking.
I yelled at her, after she shoved me, and she threatened to mace me. Since I was at least 15 feet to the north of her by then, I resisted the urge throw my coffee on her fur.
“Classly” joint be Pickle. Respectable bars on the UWS would throw such a patron out. Such bars also have security on Super Bowl Sundays.
So: nothing gentrified in the cartoon.
Who cares what happened to you? This is Bob’s excellent cartoon. Tell your stories to your granny.
Wow – what a response.
I don’t think the comment is germane ( it sounds like this happened as the woman left Pickle; how is that their doing?), but it does sound like a bad thing, which I do care about happening in our neighborhood.
I was commenting on “gentrification”, the subject of the cartoon, and a specific bar pictured in the cartoon.
Who’s Marsha?
To spare Bob the indigniy of having to describe an excellent cartoon, the two men in conversation are preceeded along the sidewalk by two women. A typical arrangement for couples on the way to somewhere. Both women can be assumed to be the mens partners. One would be the speaker’s Marsha.